How do you start 2016 when you love urban exploration? You look for abandoned places on January 1st. With Brïn and Gui, we decided to go check out abandoned subway stations, which turned out to be a failure. Urban explorers do not always find a way in an abandoned place, failing to enter is part of the exploration process. However, we were not far from Shougang, so we decided to go in to forget about our missed goal. And finally, we were back into one of the places we love the most in Beijing. I am always really excited to go back to this mythical factory, you can read a first report about it here. It was the first post I had ever written on this website, you can imagine how much I like the place.

Goodbye old railway…

The sad news is that we found out that the old train tracks surrounding Shougang, that were so nice, had already been entirely demolished. That is just so sad, we will never see this beautiful place ever again (and you know how much I love old railways):

Exploring the blast furnace area

But in spite of the sad discovery, it was a very exciting exploration, Shougang is not all down yet and through a new entry point, we got to the most interesting place in the factory: blast furnaces. Although I did not go inside any of them (Brïn did go in one, as you can imagine), I will show you in this report the shapes and spatial configurations of what used to be the factory’s beating heart. But I found the report of another exploration by an English fellow in October 2015 showing a furnace from inside. So impressive! And even without seing it, this was my favorite exploration in Shougang so far although the many dogs barking all the time gave me a headache (and I was afraid of them).

In the factory, the train tracks leading to the blast furnaces are still present.

The architecture of furnaces is quite complex, which makes them all the more beautiful.

Under one furnace, there were also signs of an artistic event that took place in 2010.

Multiple strange shapes

In any case, the exploration of Shougang is always a dazzling experience.

I just hope we can go back in Shougang very soon to document everything (and have the best of fun) about what is still there… The (demolition) work in progress is really worrying for the future of this site.